Since you only need to instal updates perhaps once a month or so anyway, and you can cancel updates if you're in a "quiet place," I can't see why this would be an issue. Just don't restart your Mac there.

Same here, if my speakers are on during o/s runtime I get the chime on startup. If muted before shutdown no chime. Never really presented a headache for me but if it does for you then sorry but there is no way I know of to have speakers on during runtime but off on startup.

All this talk about remembering to simply "mute" the volume is nonsense. People forget and the user shouldn't be forced to remember it.

Also, "sleep" is just a bandaid fix. Some of us are mobile and really need to squeeze every minute out of the battery between long periods so a shutdown is best.

The truth is Apple's unique startup "chime" is a long time branding component that goes back as far as I can remember. They intentionally want this thing going off so as many people as possible hear it.

Still doesn't mean I have to put up with it though. There's nothing more annoying than sitting at meeting listening to a late arrival start up his macbook while somebody's talking. It's worse than forgetting to mute a cell phone.

One of the first things I did in Lion after discovering the old sound-muting preference pane that worked in SL to be useless was to apply the terminal hack a few posts up the line. Works just fine. In fact, the volume stays muted after a reboot until I touch the volume key "once" which is exactly what I want. (Sometimes a website will unknowingly start playing a video or sounds which is annoying when around people).

I don't purposefully mute the volume just to not hear the chime. Sometimes I have the sound on my machine and when I reboot it chimes, it doesn't annoy me. Other times I have it muted and no chime, I don't miss the chime either.

This is working as designed. If you don't like how it is designed then look around. There may be a programmatically way to do it (as you indicated) certainly I would complain to apple. The more people complain the more they will listen.....well some of the times

There is just no way of accomplishing what the OP wants in the current offering. Aside from any debate of is this is the desired behaviour I agree with you.

Also, "sleep" is just a bandaid fix. Some of us are mobile and really need to squeeze every minute out of the battery between long periods so a shutdown is best.

Sleep is not a band-aid, it is the way normal Apple users function. The battery drain is extremely minimal. Mine was off of it's charger asleep for about 11 hours today and it lost 6%. Considering you can always plug it in when you sleep, and it lasts 7+ hours on it's battery with extremely conservative power settings, the whole sleep thing is nonsense.

All this talk about remembering to simply "mute" the volume is nonsense. People forget and the user shouldn't be forced to remember it.

Also, "sleep" is just a bandaid fix. Some of us are mobile and really need to squeeze every minute out of the battery between long periods so a shutdown is best.

The truth is Apple's unique startup "chime" is a long time branding component that goes back as far as I can remember. They intentionally want this thing going off so as many people as possible hear it.

Still doesn't mean I have to put up with it though. There's nothing more annoying than sitting at meeting listening to a late arrival start up his macbook while somebody's talking. It's worse than forgetting to mute a cell phone.

One of the first things I did in Lion after discovering the old sound-muting preference pane that worked in SL to be useless was to apply the terminal hack a few posts up the line. Works just fine. In fact, the volume stays muted after a reboot until I touch the volume key "once" which is exactly what I want. (Sometimes a website will unknowingly start playing a video or sounds which is annoying when around people).

As pointed out by someone else in this thread, the startup chime is a tool that let's the user know everything is working fine. If you don't hear the normal startup chime (it plays a different tone) then that alerts the user that something is not right.